Archive for March, 2013

Here’s a little update on the development of imgAreaSelect version 1.0 with mobile browsers support, since people are inquiring about it every now and then.

I had a plan to release the glorious version 1.0 mid-March, and for a while it seemed everything was going in the right direction — I fixed my iOS testing setup (which is a VM running Mac OS X and the iOS device simulator), resolved some issues that came up, and found the plugin to be working nicely in both iOS and Android 2.x stock browsers. Then, for the first time I tried it in Android 4′s browser, and was greatly disappointed to see it being broken and pretty much unusable.

I’m not sure what is the cause of the issues, but it seems to be related to how touch/mouse events work in the newer Android browsers, and I’m slightly worried that fixing the problems might require a significant refactoring of the event handling code in the plugin. And it doesn’t help that debugging JavaScript on mobile devices is still a pain (though, I’m having some hopes that remote debugging might improve the situation).

All in all, I can’t say how much longer it’s going to take me to fix that and make a release. Nevertheless, I’ll keep working on it and will let you know how it goes.

Here’s a slightly late announcement of a new jQuery plugin that I’ve made. Its name is TinyTimer and it’s a countdown (or countup) timer that you can put on a web page to show, for example, the number of days left until the next predicted doomsday or another significant event. Here’s how it might look:

There already are dozens of plugins that do this — my goal was to build something really tiny (not larger than 1024 bytes when minified), but still feature-rich. The list of features includes:

Monthly donations strike yet again! Today I’m making a donation to c:geo, a geocaching application for Android devices. In case you haven’t heard of geocaching, it’s a modern-day technology-driven treasure hunt game (I encourage you to find out more and try it!).

I’m not a particularly active geocacher (so far, I only found forty-something caches, over the course of a few years), but when I do have the rare opportunity to play the game, I very much enjoy it. One of the contributing factors to this enjoyment is the c:geo app, in my humble opinion the best geocaching application for Android (and I’ve tried a few). Thank you, c:geo developers, for your continuous efforts to keep it that way!

The second donation that I’m making today is to the Lynx Campaign of WWF Poland, which is an initiative for the revival of lynx population in my home country. Years of hunting and habitat loss have reduced the number of lynxes in Poland to just about two hundred, and the campaign’s plan is to increase that number by relocating animals from Estonia, where the population is stable. So, make yourselves at home, Estonian lynxes, and, well, repopulate away!

This version is actually identical to the previous one (0.6.0), the only difference is that now the zipped distribution package on jQuery Plugins comes with the minified version, in addition to the full source code. I realized that, since the package is basically a snapshot of the GitHub repository, the minified file was not included, because I wasn’t keeping it under version control (it was only available in the distribution zip archives here on my site). Now that’s fixed, and you’ll be getting the full package from jQuery Plugins.